ChalkTalk, a machine-learning platform for teachers and trainers to create real-time curriculum to personalize lessons and rapidly help students learn, has recently raised $3 million in seed funding from Florida Funders’ Fund 2.
Florida Funders is a hybrid of venture capital fund and an angel investor network that discovers, funds, and builds early-stage technology companies in Florida and beyond. The investment in ChalkTalk is the company’s sixth one from its Fund 2.
ChalkTalk helps teachers build and run their own real-time learning courses. Using results from a student placement test, ChalkTalk’s machine-learning software generates a standards-aligned curriculum customized to fit within existing class schedules. Unlike other competitors that give students practice videos and content snippets for individual consumption, ChalkTalk generates personalized lesson plans and actionable teaching materials for teacher-led instruction – whether teaching takes place in-person or remotely over a web-conferencing platform such as Zoom or Microsoft Teams.
The ChalkTalk’s platform first allows teachers to choose their curriculum and set schedule and then allows students to take a placement test online to identify their starting skill level. ChalkTalk tech then uses those inputs to dynamically create lesson plans for every day in the school schedule. Each lesson plan contains instructional materials for real-time teacher-led instruction, small group activities for real-time collaboration amongst students, and personalized practice exercises for every student – all personalized to the skills of students in the classroom. ChalkTalk is currently powering ELA & math instruction in districts across the US.
Mohannad Arbaji, Founder and CEO of ChalkTalk, said,
“Unlike other systems that are solely focused on asynchronous learning, our personalized learning solution mirrors existing class flow which is teacher-led instruction. ChalkTalk lets you choose your own curriculum, makes it adaptive, turns it into lesson plans and teaching materials, and then aligns it to your school schedule. We’re excited to partner with Florida Funders and what’s to come as we grow in the state of Florida. At ChalkTalk, we see Florida in a progressive stage for education as 90% of our users including teachers and students come from the state.”
ChalkTalk mitigates all the prep work that goes into creating personalized lesson plans, teaching materials, in-class activities, and homework assignments, bringing prep time down to two minutes. While ChalkTalk’s initial go-to-market focuses on K-12, the platform can be adapted to higher education, corporate training, and lifelong learning. The company claimed high school students who used its platform experienced an increase of 200-600% on state test scores compared to their peers after a full year of traditional instruction.
Tom Wallace, Managing Partner at Florida Funders, commented on the investment,
“Education in America is broken. ChalkTalk has taken both an innovative and technology-driven approach to helping teachers be more effective both in the classroom and remotely. ChalkTalk is seeing the most traction in Florida. With the state having some of the largest school districts in the US, including Miami-Dade, ChalkTalk is quickly evolving from a “nice-to-have” to a “must-have” for both teachers and students.”
The Florida-based company said it will use the fresh capital to expand its product offering from 11-grade ELA and math to all 12-grade levels. The company also plans to use the funds to fuel the expansion of its engineering, sales support, and marketing teams. Prior to this seed round, ChalkTalk had raised $0.5 million on SAFEs.
ChalkTalk customers include Boston Public Schools, Duval County Public Schools, Orange County Public Schools, DYSART Unified School District, White Hall School District, and more.
